Archives for September 14, 2018

I’m very, very pleased to report that Mrs. T is getting better, slowly but—it appears—surely. Two weeks after her release from New York-Presbyterian Hospital, her stamina is gradually increasing and her spirits are quite good. It helps greatly, of course, that she’s (A) not dead and (B) back in our New York apartment again. She spent the better part of a month in a pair of windowless intensive-care units in which the doctors and nurses, competent and caring though they were, seem to have gone out of their way to wake her up whenever she fell asleep. As for the food…well, we’ll skip over that. Things are much nicer at home, where we can sit on the couch together, watch movies, and dine on home cooking, some of it prepared by the two of us and some by a neighborhood friend.

So far Mrs. T hasn’t felt up to leaving the apartment for anything other than follow-up visits to her doctors at New York-Presbyterian, but we’re planning a visit to our Connecticut farmhouse, where we’ll drive around the countryside, open the mail, and enjoy the quiet pleasures of being elsewhere. We’ve also scheduled an October visit to Philadelphia’s Penn Transplant Institute in order to resume the process of getting her listed for transplant there (she’s already listed in New York).

My own life, which was turned upside down when my beloved spouse was taken ill without warning in Cape May last month, has started to right itself. I’m seeing friends and going to shows again, and later today I’ll be taping the latest in anoccasionalseries of podcasts in which Titus Techera and I talk about films (we’re discussing Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground). As for Three on the Aisle, which has been on a brief hiatus, Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are recording a brand-new episode next week.

To the countless people who sent their good wishes to the two of us, we are and will always be grateful beyond words. You warmed our hearts at a time when the world looked dark. Yes, we still have a long, unpredictable slog ahead of us, but we are both full of hope.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an important off-Broadway revival of Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Here’s an excerpt.

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David Staller is best known as the artistic director of Project Shaw, a series of semi-staged concert readings of the 60-odd plays of George Bernard Shaw that he has presented monthly in Manhattan since 2006. But he has also directed fully staged off-Broadway versions of several Shaw plays, including the Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2012 revival of “Man and Superman” and a 2016 production of “Widower’s Houses” mounted in collaboration with the now-defunct TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, both of which were not merely excellent but exceptionally memorable. Now Mr. Staller has taken on “Heartbreak House,” one of Shaw’s most challenging plays, with altogether extraordinary results.

“Heartbreak House” was long one of Shaw’s least popular plays, mainly because of its verbosity (the 1920 premiere ran for more than four hours). Since it went out of copyright, though, it’s come to be staged more often in the U.S., in part because, like “Hamlet,” it can now be cut to a manageable length. This also allows directors to put a personal spin on Shaw’s acid portrait of the Shotovers, a family of haute-bourgeoisie eccentrics whose members, for all their charm, are (as one of them puts it) “useless futile creatures” who decline to do anything to fix the corrupt, unjust Vicwardian society in which they live. Instead, they look on placidly at the German planes that bomb their country villa at play’s end…

Unlike the other “Heartbreak Houses” that I’ve reviewed, all of which were essentially traditional in approach, this version, which runs for a coruscating two hours and 40 minutes, is a conceptual staging, one whose ingenious framing device intensifies the effect of Shaw’s text instead of smothering it. Inspired by a wartime performance of the play in which Hermione Gingold took part during the London Blitz of 1940, it is set in a theater basement that has been lined with sandbags and turned into an air-raid shelter. As the sirens howl, the occupants of the theater take cover, and the actors who had been performing for them upstairs now entertain their captive audience by improvising a version of “Heartbreak House” using the props stored in the shelter.

Doing “Heartbreak House” in this way requires a perfectly believable set, and Brian Prather and Toby Algya, the scenic and sound designers, deliver the goods, turning the Lion Theatre into an exact replica of a cluttered London bomb shelter….

It is, however, Mr. Staller’s direction that gives wing to the show. The scale is very small—the Lion Theatre has only 88 seats—and the theatrical effects mostly subtle, as befits a director who has put together so many staged readings of Shaw’s plays on a budgetary shoestring. But every gesture lands with the utmost potency…

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]